ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Advertising and Marketing Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1564650
Digital Crisis Management: How Proactive Online Engagements on Patient Complaints Influence Social Media Users' Perceptions
Provisionally accepted
- Ajman University, Ajman, United Arab Emirates
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This study investigates how a pharmaceutical company's responses to patients' complaints regarding side effects affect social media users' evaluation of a paracrisis situation. An online study was conducted by simulating a real-world paracrisis situation in which patients petitioned about the serious side effects of a drug on the pharmaceutical company's Facebook page. Results showed that users who are actively engaged with social media reacted more positively when the pharmaceutical company proactively responded to a paracrisis situation. In particular, user engagement moderated the effects of company engagement on perceived crisis likelihood. In turn, perceived crisis likelihood mediated the interaction effects on users' intention to spread negative eWOM and purchase intentions. Thus, this study highlights the importance of proactive engagement by demonstrating the mitigating effects of precrisis engagement when an organization faces a potential crisis situation on social media. It adds theoretical implications to crisis communication literature and provides practical implications as to how online negative events might be managed to minimize negative consequences.
Keywords: online engagement, Paracrisis, side-effect complaints, moderated mediation, crisis communication
Received: 21 Jan 2025; Accepted: 17 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 LEE and Ben Romdhane. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: SANG LEE, Ajman University, Ajman, United Arab Emirates
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.